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Driving on the right side of the code

Test-driven development

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Given the confusion sometimes surrounding terminology of any form, and not just TDD-related terminology (although test certainly deserves special mention), one approach to clarification is to use a completely different term. This is part (but not all) of the motivation behind the adoption of terms such as Behaviour-Driven Development and Example-Driven Development.

As Dan North notes, "'Behaviour' is a more useful word than 'test'", which is not just down to a difference in meaning and emphasis: in software development, the word behaviour comes with greater precision and less baggage than test. On the other hand, the term Test-Driven Development is out there and has mindshare. So, if test is where the confusion arises, another path to clarification is to reclaim the word. This latter approach is a steeper, uphill struggle, but it can serve to highlight more clearly where misunderstandings spring from and where there is in fact common ground.

For many involved in development the notion of testing is intimately tied with the idea of "trying it out". To "try it out", therefore, needs an "it" to "try out", which necessarily places the act of testing after the act of making — to test-drive a car you first need a car, for example. With such an interpretation, it is indeed difficult to see how development could be driven forward with tests: Development-Driven Testing perhaps, but Test-Driven Development appears not to make any useful sense.

It makes even less sense if you view testing as a primarily human activity. This perspective is surprisingly common, even in this modern age of new fangled, electrically powered, automated computing machinery. If "test it" means "try it out", there is a strong sense that "someone" is doing the "trying". It is true that humans provide the ultimate reality check in software development and are essential actors for some kinds of testing, such as usability testing.

But a general approach to testing that is intrinsically labour intensive is an expensive way of doing something that computers can be programmed to do at a fraction of the cost. Fortunately, most developers and managers who view testing as a manual activity have the wit and wisdom to see that an approach where testing is both continuous and human based is unsustainable, and therefore do not attempt it. Most, but not all. I have come across a couple of projects that set out on a path to adopt what they thought of as TDD based on the idea of testing as "someone trying it out". Fortunately, these attempts ended in exhaustion and boredom before the projects ended in failure.

Taking a step back, we can see that, in its most general form, a test is a proposition about the execution of a piece of code or some aspect of a system. A test quantifies and qualifies something about a piece of software, whether from the inside — where we may, for example, talk about unit tests and class design — or the outside — where we may, for example, talk about system tests and use cases. A test therefore states a decision as well as the means to confirm that the decision is observed.

What are the decisions that are being made? They are about requirements: how we organise and interpret requirements, all the way from the system level down to individual classes and methods. Put another way, there is an intimate relationship between the idea of software requirements and testing: they represent two sides of the same coin rather than different currencies. When viewed at the system level, such requirements make up the classical notion of requirements that relate to the purpose of a software product. When viewed internally to the system, requirements represent the design decisions made by developers about how code is structured and the distribution of responsibilities across the code.

Now, here comes the driver. Instead of leaving such decisions in prose, verbal or even unspoken form, write them down for posterity in a way that is both readable and executable. Decisions can be stated explicitly and checked automatically. Importantly, decisions can be made — tests can be written — in the presence or the absence of code. The process of making these decisions is a dialogue that can be interwoven with other drivers in the development of a system. The degree of interweaving, the role of feedback and the granularity of the dialogue is what distinguishes one model of development from another, one project from another, and so on.

Of course, a test-driven perspective is not the only one a software developer needs to consider. As with so many other -driven developments in software (model, use case, story, risk, priority, etc.), even this deeper, more specification-oriented and design-centred view of tests should not be considered the sole driver. Likewise, when considered as an act of confirmation, automated testing is also only one of a number of complementary means, which include peer review, static analysis and user feedback. The key is to recognise it as one of many, rather than none of many. The visibility and clarification that TDD can bring to understanding requirements and articulating design make it a skill (yes, it requires skill) worth considering, acquiring and applying.

Welcome back to Kevlin Henney, who’s been occupied with co-writing two volumes in Wiley’s Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series (these should be available in April).